Mattel, Inkorporated

Parents are up in arms over the latest "Gold Label Collector" Barbie, who sports permanent tattoos and leopard-skin leggings, a la Peg Bundy:

She finally did it.  Barbie has out-skanked the Bratz dolls. 

Barbie has dabbled in body art before, but the tattoos packaged with the 2009 Totally Stylin' model were just temporary heart and rainbow designs.  Tattoos are becoming increasingly mainstream, with about 13% of adolescents getting inked.  It's a perennial rite of passage for teens to adopt outrageous trends just to piss off their parents.  The obvious difference, though, between a tattoo and midriff-baring tops is that one is permanent and the other isn't. (Except in cyberspace.  Aren't you glad the Internet didn't exist back when you had a mullet?)  Sure, your kid could have a tattoo removal in the future, but it's expensive and not always successful. The health risks of tattoos, particularly hepatitis B and C, are generally well known.  Some parents, though, feel that if they let their teenager go to a reputable parlor (an oxymoron, if there ever was one), what harm could there be?

Plenty, it turns out.  Several studies have shown a strong correlation between adolescent tattoos and high-risk behaviors.  The largest was a survey of over 6,000 adolescents.  At baseline, tattooed kids were more likely to live in a single-parent household with lower levels of parental education and income.  After controlling for these risk factors, tattooed kids still had higher levels of substance use, violent behavior, early sexual involvement and school truancy and failure.  Another survey found not only higher rates of drug use, violence and sexual activity in tattooed adolescents but also increased risks of disordered eating and suicidal behavior.

Wait a minute, you say, having a tattoo is simply associated with these high-risk behaviors -- surely getting a tattoo doesn't cause them.  That may be true, but there are multiple studies showing that having a visible tattoo affects others' perceptions in a negative way.  In one study, 286 people were asked to describe the personality characteristics of virtual avatars who were identical, except for the presence or absence of tattoos.  Tattooed avatars, especially the female ones, were described as having significantly more sexual partners.  Another study asked college students, a third of whom had tattoos, to describe the personality characteristics of a photographed female model with a large dragon tattoo, compared to the same model with the tattoo Photoshopped out.  The students described the tattooed model as being less intelligent, caring, attractive, fashionable and athletic.  (On the flip side, she was deemed to be "more creative.")  Interestingly, the results were much less impressive when the experiment was repeated with a model who had a small dolphin tattoo.

I've never wanted a tattoo, even as a teenager.  But when I was a college freshman, I had my ears double-pierced.  My conservative, first-generation immigrant parents made me remove the posts so the holes would close up, since "only bad girls" would mutilate their ears like that.  When I tearfully tried to explain that the piercing would in no way make me misbehave, they said, "No, but everyone will think you're a bad girl, and you'll attract only the bad boys" -- precisely the same argument I'm now making about tattoos.  Double earlobe piercings are so mainstream now, even passe, that I don't think their argument holds water any more.  Maybe the same will be true of tattoos in the next 20 years.  But you can rest assured that my kids won't be getting inked as long as they're under my roof.

Unless they want to write "Mother."

Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea?

If you know the answer to that question, welcome to my world.  I was planning to blog about something "serious" today, but an article in my morning paper caught my eye: "SpongeBob in hot water from study of 4-year-olds."  A randomized, controlled trial on SpongeBob SquarePants?  How could I resist?  I found the study easily.  It was a free "early online release" from the venerable Pediatrics journal.  ("The immediate impact of different types of television on young children's executive function.")  Early release articles are typically trials that post such impressive results that they have to be published online immediately, to save as many lives as possible.  I guess the editors of Pediatrics felt that they had to put a grinding halt to the zombification of American 4-year-olds.

The researchers randomized sixty 4-year-olds to 9 minutes of SpongeBob, Caillou (the most boring educational cartoon ever produced; the only reason to watch is to learn how to pronounce "Caillou") or drawing.  They then had them take four different tests of "executive function," a fancy term for "more complicated decision-making."  One of these tests, for example, was the classic delay-of-gratification task, in which the child is told he could either have 2 marshmallows immediately, or 10 marshmallows in about 5 minutes.  The child is timed, and the longer he can hold off, the better he is at delaying gratification.  


SpongeBob was classified as being fast-paced, compared to the pokey pace of Caillou:  the scenes in SpongeBob shift every 11 seconds, compared to every 34 seconds in Caillou. The investigators hypothesized that watching a fast-paced cartoon would negatively affect the subjects' attention spans, and thus their executive functions, and they were right.  Here are how the three groups performed on their tests:*

Predictably, a spokesman from Nickolodeon skewered the study, saying "Having 60 non-diverse kids....watch 9 minutes of programming is questionable methodology and could not possibly provide the basis for any valid findings that parents could trust."  Hey, Nickolodeon, I'm sure you can always find some helpful legal advice from the folks at Phillip Morris!  Actually, I do think he has a point.  The study was small and only partially blinded, and the results may not pertain to older kids.  None of the subjects were tested before the videos to see what their baseline attention spans were.  Finally, the tests were performed immediately after the videos were shown, so even if the results are true, who knows if the negative effects are long-lasting?


The lead author did make a point which gave me pause: "I wouldn't advise watching such shows on the way to school or any time they're expected to pay attention or learn."  My kids watch not 9, but 30 minutes of SpongeBob every weekday -- before they leave for school.  Maybe I'll do their teachers a favor and detox them on Caillou. 


*HTKS, by the way, refers to "Head Toes Knees Shoulders."  I thought at first that they were making the kids run through the popular "Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes" song, but no.  Instead, kids were asked to touch their head when the instructor told them to touch their toes, and vice-versa, with increasingly confusing variations.  I'm pretty sure my scores would have been unplottably low, SpongeBob exposure or not.

Son of a Gun!

Cops and Robbers.  Cowboys and Indians.  Or, to be au courant, Cowboys and Aliens.

Would you let your kids play with toy guns?  If your answer is “yes,” you’re in the minority.  A 2009 survey conducted in pediatricians’ offices of over 800 parents found that 67% would “never” allow their child to play with a toy gun. (“Community norms on toy guns”)  I personally find this hard to believe, as most of my son’s friends have toy weapons, but maybe he runs with sociopaths.  More likely, the parents in this study were trying to curry favor with their doctors, just as I tell my kids’ dentist that they “rarely” eat candy and “always” brush their teeth.

At the same time, I do know parents who have a zero tolerance weapons policy, to the point that they spell out the word “G-U-N” in front of little Rambo.  Their concern, of course, is that playing with toy weapons might make them more aggressive kids, which might result in their becoming more aggressive adults.  But is there any data to substantiate this concern?

Before you read any further, here’s my full disclosure:  We hosted a Nerf gun birthday party for our 8-year-old son and 20 of his buddies, complete with a stadium rock soundtrack and American Gladiator code names: 

Based on this uncontrolled, observational study (and when I say “uncontrolled,” I really mean “out of control”), toy gun play led to increased levels of aggression and decreased levels of cooperation, with the birthday boy entering full sulk mode as every kid jockeyed for control of his Vulcan EBF-25 machine gun.  (Yes, you can buy machine guns for kids.) 

Before you scoff at my unscientific report, let me assure you that the quality of the “war toy” literature is little better, and the quantity scant, especially compared to the vast number of studies on violent video games and T.V. shows.  In one typical study, preschoolers were watched through a one-way mirror playing with their usual toys, new airplanes, or new guns.  (“Effects of toy guns and airplanes on children’s antisocial free play behavior”)  Two observers counted the number of instances of “physical, antisocial behavior,” such as hitting, kicking, shoving, or grabbing objects away from others.  “Thematic aggression,” e.g., pretending to kill someone with a gun, was not counted as antisocial behavior, though some would object to this exclusion.  Here were their results:

Guns clearly led to higher rates of antisocial behaviors, though airplanes were not far behind.  The main flaw in this and similar studies is, of course, that the observers were not blinded to the intervention – they obviously knew when the children were exposed to guns vs. airplanes – and you could see how it would be easy to find aggression when you want to find aggression, especially if you have a postdoctoral thesis riding on the results.

To get past the subjective nature of this research, investigators at Knox College came up with an ingenious way of measuring the effects of gunplay on aggression.  (“Guns, testosterone and aggression")  In this study, male college students were divided into two groups:  those who were allowed to play with (though not shoot) a pellet gun, and those who were allowed to play with the game Mouse Trap.  Testosterone levels in saliva samples were measured before and after the play sessions, as testosterone levels have been shown to correlate with aggressive behavior.  You probably won’t be surprised to hear that testosterone levels increased after exposure to the gun, but not the game.  Here’s where it gets interesting:  After the play session, investigators asked the students to add as much hot sauce as they wanted to a cup of water, which they were told would be given to another, anonymous subject to drink.  Hot sauce administration has been validated in other studies as a marker for physical aggression; it’s sort of a sadistic twist to the infamous Milgram’s fake shock experiments.  Turns out that the guys who played with the gun added three times as much hot sauce to the water as those who played with little mousie.  “Interestingly,” the authors deadpanned, “several subjects were disappointed when told that the sample of hot sauce and water they had prepared would not actually be given to the next subject.”

Whether this research applies at all to girls, or even prepubescent boys, is a big question mark.  And while there seems to be a short-term link between gunplay and aggression, there are absolutely no studies, not even retrospective ones, that examine whether adult antisocial  behavior might be linked to playing with weapons as children.  I guess we parents are left with performing what doctors call “N of 1” experiments – seeing how our own particular child responds to weapon play.  So I say let them play Cowboys and Aliens! But if their playdates end up being more Pulp Fiction than science fiction….well, maybe it’s time to pack the six-shooter away.